{"id":40539,"date":"2026-04-24T00:20:08","date_gmt":"2026-04-24T00:20:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/40539\/"},"modified":"2026-04-24T00:20:08","modified_gmt":"2026-04-24T00:20:08","slug":"after-toasting-e90b-loan-eu-leaders-face-up-to-the-morning-after-politico","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/40539\/","title":{"rendered":"After toasting \u20ac90B loan, EU leaders face up to the morning after \u2013 POLITICO"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>As European heads of state and government dined together on Thursday in the Cypriot resort of Ayia Napa, on the first day of a two-day gathering largely focused on global politics, any sense of triumph ebbed as they confronted the many challenges and crises on their plates. While they had the luxury of not needing to put their names to a joint statement that evening, their conversation \u2015 over lamb and ravioli \u2015 once again exposed how hard they find it to agree on the way forward.<\/p>\n<p>The good news had come earlier when, after months of delay \u2015 mainly down to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orb\u00e1n\u2019s intransigence \u2015 his country and Slovakia dropped their vetoes on the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.politico.eu\/article\/eu-approves-e90b-loan-to-ukraine\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">funds for Ukraine<\/a> first agreed in December. The EU also <a href=\"https:\/\/www.politico.eu\/article\/eu-sanction-russia-banks-vladimir-putin-war-economy\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">approved its 20th round of sanctions<\/a> on Russia.<\/p>\n<p>Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian president who joined the EU talks, seemed jollier than he had been in months, one diplomat present for some of the discussion in Cyprus said.<\/p>\n<p>Not \u2018realistic\u2019<\/p>\n<p>But the celebration will be short-lived. The next item on the EU\u2019s agenda is <a href=\"https:\/\/www.politico.eu\/article\/eu-forges-ahead-membership-ukraine-moldova-after-orban-exit\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">whether, how and when<\/a> to get his war-torn nation into its club. It is a likely component of any peace deal with Russia and, while the path to EU membership looks a little more feasible now Orb\u00e1n is on his way out after a brutal election defeat, it is nothing like straightforward.<\/p>\n<p>The turquoise waters that provided the stunning backdrop to the summit could not disguise the EU\u2019s fractures. While Estonian Prime Minister Kristen Michal told reporters he favored \u201caccelerating\u201d Ukraine\u2019s membership, Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovi\u0107 all but scoffed at the idea of Kyiv joining anytime soon.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI don\u2019t think it\u2019s realistic that it\u2019ll happen on the first of January \u201927,\u201d he said. Croatia, which became the latest member of the bloc in 2013, \u201cwas relatively fast\u201d to do so and it still took \u201csix years to negotiate.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As European heads of state and government dined together on Thursday in the Cypriot resort of Ayia Napa,&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":40540,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[130],"tags":[26283,2499,5816,1062,948,11620,2698,399,12,242,468,34,26284,303,11621,329,1434,5895,330,17,350,325,185,1764],"class_list":["post-40539","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-volodymyr-zelenskyy","tag-andrej-plenkovic","tag-bart-de-wever","tag-belgium","tag-budget","tag-conflict","tag-croatia","tag-cyprus","tag-defense","tag-donald-trump","tag-emmanuel-macron","tag-energy-prices","tag-iran","tag-kristen-michal","tag-middle-east","tag-moldova","tag-russia","tag-sanctions","tag-slovakia","tag-ukraine","tag-united-states","tag-viktor-orban","tag-volodymyr-zelenskyy","tag-war","tag-war-in-iran"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@people\/116456824734327500","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40539","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40539"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40539\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/40540"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40539"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40539"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40539"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}